Audible's paid user listening hours up 39%

India emerged as one of the fastest growing market in 2022 for Audible, the online audiobook service owned by Amazon, with 39% growth in paid member listening hours over 2021. Since launching its services in November 2018, Audible has operated both free and paid tiers, offering content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu and Bengali. The platform's paid subscription, at ₹199 per month, allows users one credit per month that can be used to access one book of their choice.

- LataJha

"We're still in early days of building (the audio listening) category in India but expanding rapidly as we diversify our offerings beyond book adaptations to appeal to non-readers as well and find ways to localize in the regional languages," said Shailesh Sawlani, country manager, India, Audible, in an interview. Increasingly, especially for free tier, the audience has been skewed towards nonreaders, he added.